Laptop archeology – or – how to install NixOS 24.11 on a 25 year old laptop
Earlier this year I brought an old laptop to my home my grandfather once gave. It is a relict from roughly 1999, with which I’ve already played around some nine years ago.
Prior to 38C3 I had the idea to bring it to the congress so people could mess around with it. In the end, I was the one messing around with it, fighting to get some operating systems installed on this poor thing.
The laptop I’m talking about is a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S4510 with BIOS version 1.36 released at 1999-11-30. The hostnamectl status output is expectedly really hilarious (the firmware age is originally printed in yellow):
This device has a Intel(R) Pentium(R) III (Coppermine) processor with astonishing 0.4GHz single core. No multithreading. According to Wikipedia, this processor was produced with a 180 nm process node. It has 32 KiB of L1 cache and a 256KiB L2 cache, not bad for its time.
This thing boasts 256 MiB of SDRAM running at 100 MHz. According to lshw, it even has an empty second slot, but I don’t have any sticks to insert.
